Best investigative journalism: Tampa Bay Times & Sarasota Herald-Tribune. Ever heard of them?
This is availability bias.
Good journalism is all over the place. If you're looking at CNN and MSNBC and Fox News and lamenting the state of journalism vs. fluff in the modern era, you're looking in the wrong places! You're literally singling out the shitty news and assuming that represents everything.
I guarantee if you go to your local paper or local news station and check out their investigative journalists, you'll find some incredibly talented, passionate people who report on real stories.
Yes, the economics are such that for every in-depth investigative piece, you have a ton of press release reports, and fluff. But that's true on blogs as well.
I just took a look at the Pulitzer Prize winners for investigative reporting[0] and I havn't heard of any of them from the last ten years. Didn't look any further.
If anything, corporate "news" spam drowns out these deeply researched investigative stories because, as GP said, the market conditions favor drama farming clickbait over an "exposé of highly toxic hazards inside Florida’s only battery recycling plant" which, while clearly important and deeply researched, I have never heard of.
That said, most of these journalists are from "corporate media," so that it "produces nothing of intellectual value" is as you say incorrect.
You're right, the Guardian and the Intercept have done some very good investigative journalism in the last few years, particularly around Snowden and the US surveillance state. However they are certainly not the only ones producing impactful journalism.
Here is a good list of some great journalism from the last year. Some of the media outlets are "mainstream" (note I really dislike that term as it is usually used by people being adversarial towards the media for their own gain). Some are small local papers. Some have what is perceived to be a left leaning ideological bent, and some have a right.
I find that many people laud the journalism and outlets that support their viewpoint. However, they avoid or actively denigrate good journalism and outlets that oppose their viewpoint. From your reading choices, I'm guessing that you probably don't read the Wall Street Journal or other sources with a perceived conservative bent. If not, you should try. And try some sources such as the Associated Press and Reuters which focus on producing content for many media outlets with different viewpoints and biases. Good journalism is being done across the spectrum. It should be supported, regardless of your political leanings, as the basis of a shared reality in which we as humans can make good decisions.
Pulitzer is rewarding high-brow emotional appeal journalism. All disaster and irrelevant scandal. The journalism we need today is shining light on the ever-increasing complexities of the world and the effects, not the latest shock, awe, and smear.
Good stories take months (sometimes years), so you need hundreds of good journalists to make good stories in a high enough frequency that people would even consider paying for a subscription.
You're either chasing public grants (and people always question your impartiality), or you die. You can count on one hand the ones that have been in this game for longer than a decade and even then you'll have fingers to spare.
Today we lost a great one.
Disclaimer: I work for OCCRP.org which I would (subjectively) put in the same basket. No Pulitzer yet, but we got a Nobel Peace Prize nomination this year!
What you're describing is the narrative that most media barons pushed from the 50's onwards - the notion of "quality journalism" - it's the reason the Pulitzer prize exists at all (http://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2015/04/2015-pulitzer...). It was built to legitimize newspapers.
Media barons didn't hire journalists because they were ethical and factually accurate. They created that narrative because otherwise those people wouldn't churn out relevant and timely content to suit their readership. When the readership changes, media follows it. There is no intrinsic value in serving up the truth as it pertains to stock price.
Now you may argue that places like the NYT are the exception. But even here, this high falutin branding is there only to justify the power of ads for a different (read: intellectual) audience. If the NYT was forced to focus on one of their verticals today, would it be news? No. It would be food, fashion, and lifestyle because that's what drives all their traffic.
I feel like there's a large delta between lazy shitty journalism that is pumped out for news websites and real investigative journalism that is incredibly eye-opening and insightful.
That's exactly what good journalism does. It informs and entertains, while providing a balanced view of the subject and covering all the salient points. It's very difficult to do right, hence the reason that journalists used to be respected and there are awards for it.
Look at it this way, journalism’s most prized.... award... the Pulitzer, is named after a man famous for introducing the original Fake News ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yellow_journalism )
This is a bold statement. I think its an untrue statement too. Sure, the main stream media may be a giant dumpster fire. However, there are more journalists then ever doing extremely fantastic work. Just because most people don't see them or read about them doesn't mean Journalism is at its lowest ever point.
Allow me to provide just 3 of the countless example of fantastic journalism that still exists today:
- Many of the journalists covering the Portland protests literally risked life and limb to uncover policing abuses.
- Data journalists at the Covid Tracking Project were compiling and producing such high quality data that governments were using them to forecast local covid health trends.
>Journalists regularly omitted things from reporting that was widely known to support popular political narratives or their own ideas of what good outcomes would be, "for the good of the country".
To paraphrase Mitch Hedburg, sure, they used to. They still do, but they used to, too. But now there are fewer of them.
>Investigative journalism is alive and probably better than ever before despite being less profitable than wildly irresponsible opinion masquerading as journalism.
This strikes me as kind of a crazy claim, but in the grandparent I was bemoaning the decline of functional local journalism. The rot hasn't really, truly hit big newspapers in big cities; the parent's citation of the continued existence of the Pulitzer Prize for Investigative Reporting kinda doesn't change the realities of the local news, the decline of which is evident, well-studied, and heralds corruption of both democracy and mere finance.[0][1][2]
I've linked blog-level readings, but feel free to scrutinize the links in the Global Anti-Corruption Blog article [0] for more academic analysis on the topic.
Look to groups like Alden Capital [3], which buy up and destroy small-town American news sources. You'll find that those disappearing local papers used to pen most of the original reporting in the US. It's so fucking evident that mainstream institutions like Netflix recognize it -- namely, "The Patriot Act with Hasan Minhaj" [4] on exactly what I'm talking about.
I am constantly baffled at the sweeping statements that get made about modern journalism.
In the "days of yore" the quality of journalism was higher? Journalists regularly omitted things from reporting that was widely known to support popular political narratives or their own ideas of what good outcomes would be, "for the good of the country".
Investigative journalism is alive and probably better than ever before despite being less profitable than wildly irresponsible opinion masquerading as journalism.
Look at the Pulizer Won by the Boston Globe for 2021, lifesaving investigative journalism that is expensive and difficult- and exactly the sort of thing that the Golden Age would have never dug up.
I dunno I went to high-school with a guy that went on to win a Pulitzer for covering the aftermath of the War on Terror, focusing on when the troops involved came home and the effects on them and their families and communities.
One guy in my home town came back a serial killer and started murdering women. Others formed gangs or killed themselves or harmed their families. There is real journalism out there still.
...And it still is. The last investigative journalism conference I went to, Woodward was the keynote speaker. Seymour Hersh and James Bamford, too. The recent set of investigative and public service Pulitzers aren't chump change themselves:
What I find faulty about the OP's premise is that he bemoans the dying press, which he sees as making a devil's deal with the "ruling class". I wonder if the OP considered the effect of the Internet on news organizations' business model as a possible reason why there seems to be less substantive news, or is that just too prosaic of an explanation?
Best investigative journalism: Tampa Bay Times & Sarasota Herald-Tribune. Ever heard of them?
This is availability bias.
Good journalism is all over the place. If you're looking at CNN and MSNBC and Fox News and lamenting the state of journalism vs. fluff in the modern era, you're looking in the wrong places! You're literally singling out the shitty news and assuming that represents everything.
I guarantee if you go to your local paper or local news station and check out their investigative journalists, you'll find some incredibly talented, passionate people who report on real stories.
Yes, the economics are such that for every in-depth investigative piece, you have a ton of press release reports, and fluff. But that's true on blogs as well.
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